Patterns do not necessarily have to repeat exactly.
Enough of the command economy could perhaps be reconstituted in China so that an economy based for a few years on building capital equipment to deal with energy shortages might be possible.
Important trading partners of China would include Australia, Russia and Brazil, for iron, coal and agricultural produce as well as goods perhaps by barter from the US.

The far eastern nexus including Japan and Korea and South-East Asia is probably the most powerful in the world now.

Yah, I agree with BOP: there's always some sort of change going on between which countries are dominant. You could even claim that the roman empire was weakened because of a transition of power from Romans to the colonies ("the trouser wearing senators" as opposed to toga wearers).

I can venture a possible continuation of the theme though: U.S. goes bankrupt because cheap oil ceases to exist, per capita we don't produce as much as we used to, and making money by selling each other houses has finally collapsed. What's strange is the the first part, cheap oil, is straight from the neocon playbook. Remember the project for a new american century papers published a few years before the second iraq war. However, as far as I can tell, the neocon response to this problem, invasion, has only exacerbated the problem thus far (costs a lot and isn't securing any oil supplies). A better strategy might have been to try to focus on the next resource that would drive world power rather than the last one, but who knows.

Hello NeverLNG,

Yep, gotta agree with you. If we had never discovered the North American supplies of FFs & I-NPK*--> our population would probably be 50-100 million living in Haitian levels of deforestation and deprivation:

http://ias.okstate.edu/firstpatent.htm
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The First Patent
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* Element K = Potassium, found in pot ashes

Most 'Murkans have no idea of our agricultural history and the impact upon the habitat. I like to use the 'excessive' example whereby most of my local neighbors in my Asphalt Wonderland think the food in the grocery store is delivered by lobsters bearing bananas in their claws across the Sonoran Desert. The madness continues: the golf courses, the upscale malls, and the well-to-do resorts are now starting to put down their winter lawn grass seed to lure the endangered snowbird.

Sadly, I wasn't being sarcastic. I don't know how much the state of our forests mirrors the state of our financial system, or the state of any other system or ecosystem in this country. It's a good guess though, that they are all reflections of each other, and that they are not being managed properly. My grandfather, Gordon Robinson, was one of the pioneers of multiple-use forestry, and he would take me up into the Sierra's and describe the different systems at play, including the soil, and the microbes within the soil that contain most of the water and nutrients of the forest system. In a multiple-use system, there is logging, but its not clear-cutting to be replaced with a mono-crop tree farm. The multiple-use includes: wilderness, selective-logging, recreation, hunting and fishing and overall maintaining the forest in a state where it can be used by humans and nature, indefinitely.

Here's a link to Gordon's book, The Forest and the Trees, from google, if anyone is interested.

The Forest and Trees Gordon Robinson

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Dunno, but the risks would seem minimal compared to an apparent willingness to court war.
They don't seem particularly worried that they will get prosecuted for any misdeed, judging by the way Hathaway was fed contracts.
It's really not too surprising when they have chums in the establishment who all scratch each others backs - witness Paulson's incestous relationship with Goldman Sach's and his bailing his billionaire chums out with taxpayers money in the Frannie fiasco.

Ten years ago, I would have agreed with you, but like inflation corruption and the debasement of office accelerates as it goes on, as does the insolence of office in a similar manner to a serial killer, who starts making mistakes as he feels himself over and above the law.

Hubris is a universal human failing, and all it's symptoms are fully on display in the current administration.

Perhaps it is not just the Bush administration "gaming" the system. Who is going to whistleblow this if all the players are playing the same game?

What would be the risk/reward ratio? Prosecuted and sent to jail, anyone who was caught using taxpayers money in an attempt to manipulate the futures market, but what gain if not caught?

They didn't seem to have any moral scrupals about mudering over a million and displacing millions more in waging a terroristic war on Iraq and Afghanistan. So what's a little market manipulation compared to genocide?

The CIA has billions and the ghost companies to do it.

Here is information that the Fed is knowingly acting illegally by allowing Banks to use depositors money for trading:

Bernanke Violates Federal Reserve Act Section 23A

Allowing banks to extend funds to their brokerage affiliates is in violation of Federal Reserve Act Section 23A.

Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act ( Act ), originally enacted as part of the Banking Act of 1933, is designed to prevent the misuse of a bank's resources through non-arm's-length transactions with its affiliates and to limit the ability of a bank to transfer its federal subsidy to its affiliates.

Permissions have been issued to AIG to do so, even though the Fed does not have that power:
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2008-01-01T00%3...